How We Start to Develop Online Marketing Strategies for Our Clients
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SEO (and online marketing in general) is a funny thing. What we find most interesting about it is peoples perception of what is involved and what should be focused on. The hard truth is that there is no cut and dry process that works for everyone, and the reason for this is that, not every website is the same, and not every user is the same. So why do you try to make your process of strategy and execution fit in a mold? You shouldn’t. The following is a break down of how we look at developing online marketing strategies, from a somewhat high level.
#1. Set a Budget
Okay, okay. We know that this is always the “elephant in the room” type of topic and is not something that businesses want to discuss or think about, but it must be done. Setting a budget allows you to plan for how much of your business you will invest into making your efforts a success. Before you go off thinking that budget (and more so, large budget) equals success, let me stop you for a second. Big budget does not equal success with your business, nor does small budget or anywhere in between. What matters most is setting the budget, and doing a good job in identifying opportunities, and capitalizing on them accordingly.
< pro-tip >When partnering with an outside firm, such as Regal Creative, a budget is a must. Firms / agencies like us either need to know your budget, or be involved in the process of scoping a budget so that you know and understand what you should have for expectations in terms of deliverables and end results. Without budgets and proper expectations, it is almost guaranteed that you will either have a bad experience, not be successful, or both.< /end-pro-tip >
So what should our budget be?
If we’re a business that actually cares about our numbers, then we should know how much our projections each month are for revenue (more or less), the cost of running our business, and our overall margins. Based on that, we should be able to create and dedicate a budget on a monthly / annual basis that we will use to fund our overall efforts. We can create our budgets in a number of different ways:
- Percentage-of-sales: where we take our previous sales revenue and set our budget based on a percentage of that (let’s say 10% - so if you do $10,000 per month in sales, you will be dedicating $1,000 per month to marketing resources, or $12,000 per year overall)
- The Flat Dollar Approach: This is common for smaller businesses who don’t want to base it on fluctuating numbers, but instead just set a flat amount and run with it. So, regardless of revenue, we may say that we only want to spend $10,000 per year on our marketing efforts overall. This may work for some businesses, but not all, and you really need to take your overall revenue and fixed costs into account when setting this.
- Project Plan Objectives: This is often done when someone is scoping out a pre-defined project, such as a website. Typically, companies will approach a marketing, web design, SEO, etc. firm / agency and explain what they are wanting to do. From there, they are given proposals which they then choose the winning firm based on overall solution, perceived quality, and cost. We often times see full marketing dollars utilized in this way (typically with smaller businesses). Mid-larger size businesses however, may do this in addition or as a portion of their marketing spend overall. It all depends on who you are and what you are able to do, and it does not work for everyone.
So, what do we recommend for how to set your budget? Well, we can’t advise you in that way 😉 We do recommend using your business numbers and your accountant if you have one. We can help direct you to the best opportunities for how to spend the dollars you’ve allocated, but are not really qualified to tell you how to allocate your overall business dollars and budget. And ultimately, we have read recommendations from others that suggest between 7%-10% based on total revenue is adequate allocation of marketing spend, including staffing costs.
So, if we do the math:
Annual Business Revenue = $100,000
Marketing Budget % = 10%
Annual Marketing Budget = $10,000
There are many different strategies that are available to us to utilize for improving our business, however, not all of them may fit our needs and not all of them may fit our budget.
So, let’s do some research on our audience to find out more about what they are looking for, so that we can determine the tactics that are right for us.
#2. Learn Your Audience
So let’s assume we’ve done our due diligence, we’ve set our budget, we’ve found a firm to partner with, and we’re ready to start putting together our online marketing strategies for our business. What is the next step?
Well, if you’ve chosen Regal Creative to work with, the next step would be to learn more about who we are trying to market to. Audience is such a big portion and can greatly influence the tactics we choose, the content topics and tone we create, and the types of reporting we do to measure success; so it’s essential that we learn about your business, your products or service, and who you’re distributing to. It’s time to learn our audience—through a case study!
Let’s hypothetically say that you own a business. More specifically, you hypothetically own a cupcake business. If you’re the Milwaukee Cupcake Company that is located in the Landmark Building in the Third Ward (4 floors below us), then hopefully this hypothetical case study can apply, more or less hypothetically, to you 😉
Okay, so you’re a Milwaukee (aka - local) cupcake company, and you are trying to figure out the most effective ways to market your business. We’ve already established what we think would be good for a starting budget (remember, this can be modified over time), we’ve already selected our partner to work with, and now we’re ready to start learning who our target audience(s) actually is.
The first step in determining our audience is to look at who we currently sell to (Remember, we are already in business so this information is known. If you’re a new business, then you’ll need to do some additional research to figure this info out). For our company, we are located in downtown Milwaukee and we are seeing the following customers come through often, and bring a good amount of business:
Now, this may not completely incorporate all the people we sell our products to, but it does represent the types of people we want to focus our selling on, for a number of reasons. Reasons may include fitting the income profile we hope to work with, the cultural style that fits our company or that we like dealing with, as well as the opportunity for good repeat business and referrals. Once we have determined who we are trying to sell to (again, we may actually sell to many other profiles than our targets, and our targets may be more or less than those listed above), we need to find out a little more about where they like to play, which will then drive us into starting to determine the search and social intent behind them.
Defining a Persona: Let’s take our young to middle-aged parents as an example, and actually create a real person out of them (this is what we call, “creating a persona”). Persona’s important for this process as it allows us to see our target audience as what they really are - and that’s more than just some data on a sheet. They’re people, so let’s define them as such! Okay, so we are first going to name our parent so as to make them seem a bit more real to us, and so that we can start to understand who they really are. Let’s call our young parent, [pl_tooltip tip=”HI SALLY!!!” position=”right”]”Sally”[/pl_tooltip].
So who is Sally really?
- Sally is a young mom
- She is in her mid to late 30’s
- She works part-time
- She’s very active in her community
- She is very active in her children’s schooling
- Sally enjoys a creatively-based life (arts and crafts - loves Pinterest)
- Sally likes to go on dates with her husband [pl_tooltip tip=”HI JEFF!!!!!” position=”right”]”Jeff”[/pl_tooltip] throughout Milwaukee
- She loves tasty treats
- She values great customer service
- She’s eager to share the things she loves in life with her friends and family through day-to-day conversation, social media (Facebook and Pinterest), and her WordPress or Blogspot-hosted blog
As we can see, Sally very active with her family, in her community, and with her friends. She loves the small things in life, is creative, and loves to share it via her words on a blog and social media, specifically Facebook and Pinterest.
This is a pretty good overview of one of our main target profiles and already is showing us some great opportunities for where and how we should market our products and services. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet, we still have some more work to do.
#3. Online Marketing Opportunities
As mentioned in the marketing tactics graphic above, there’s a lot that small businesses (and businesses in general) can do to market themselves. We have seen from the persona creation exercise that there are a few opportunities already in front of us with Sally as well. So let’s dive into some areas of online marketing that are some “low hanging fruits” for our business.
- Social Media: We saw with our Sally persona that she is heavily involved with social media. More specifically, we found that she is very involved in Facebook and Pinterest. Our business, being a specialty commodity-based business is inherently setup to do well in social media. If we purchased a decent camera and made a point to take frequent pictures of our products, whether randomly throughout the store or on a per-project basis (aka - birthday party for Sally’s children), we have just found content that can be used on both Facebook and Pinterest. So this is almost a no-brainer for us to spend our time and effort on (or partner with someone who can work closely with us to do it).
- Blogging: Content creation is one of the primary strategies that we as a digital marketing firm use in almost any situation. Whether that be for SEO, brand awareness / recognition, reputation management, etc. It is a cornerstone of business online and is essential towards the success of almost any digital marketing campaign. Sally loves to blog and she loves to share others’ content socially, which means that we have a great opportunity for connecting with Sally on a very personal level to not only give her enjoyment with our products and services, but also give her enjoyment with things that are outside our business. This can build brand awareness, recognition, and also be incorporated into an SEO campaign to build social engagement and natural links.
- Email Marketing: Because most of our customers are tech savvy (they’re business professionals, socially and technologically connected young to middle-aged parents, and brides to be (who often go to the internet to find vendors for their wedding wants)) it is safe to assume that they don’t always want to search out the websites of their favorite brands to read the information. It’s also safe to assume that, since we’re a product / service based company, they may also like to get email updates regarding specials, promotions, new types of cupcakes, etc. delivered to their inbox. So why not setup a branded, automated campaign within MailChimp to deliver this kind of content to them?
- Local & Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is a process that we receive inquires and questions about every day. What does SEO mean? What does it entail? When can we expect results? So on, and so forth. Ultimately, for those that don’t know, SEO is the process of optimizing a website to have improved visibility within search results pages for search terms that you want to show up for. The tactics that are utilized to make SEO successful for a business may incorporate other tactics such as social media, content generation (blogging), public relations outreach, graphic design and distribution, and more. It’s a great opportunity and should be done by every business that is looking to gain business through search engines like Google and Bing. In this instance, our opportunity greatly resides in both organic SEO as well as local SEO, which are two different things. We’ll save the more in-depth explanations of these for a later date.
- Pay Per Click Advertising: Pay Per Click advertising, also known as PPC is most well known as being the ads you see in search engines like Google, when you do a search for a keyword. However, social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also have ad platforms that they allows businesses / individuals to use that are also PPC-like based. PPC allows us to target specific keywords, demographics, regions, and more to show our advertisements to a specific set of people. So, as an example, we could choose to show an ad on Facebook to users who are female, between the ages of 25 and 40, that are interested in blogging or crafts, and have children. Our ads can be completely customized and tailored in a way that stand out to those users, and drive traffic to our dedicated pages for them. Of course, with Facebook and other platforms, they’re also based on retargeting models, but again, that’s a whole other blog post in and of itself, so we’ll save that for later.
- Keyword Research to determine searcher intent (SEO | Blogging)
- User Profile Research to determine user activity within social media platforms (Social Media | Blogging | SEO)
- Content Schedule to organize our ongoing efforts (Blogging | SEO | Social Media)
- Distribution & Consumer Engagement Schedule to organize our connection with our users (Social Media | Blogging | SEO)
- etc., etc.
So these are some examples of online marketing opportunities that we know may be beneficial to us to look into using and testing, as they fit our demographics landscape well, and they are, more or less, rather cost effective (as well as long-term) strategies that we can benefit from. We’ve set our budget, we’ve gotten to know our users, and we’ve reviewed some of the top marketing opportunities in front of us.
From here, we would decide which tactics would be best to focus on based on ease / difficulty of entrance to market in coordination with our budget, and would start to create specific strategies for each tactic.
#4. Develop a Holistic Strategy
The work we’ve done thus far is only the tip of the iceberg to what we will be working on, but it is extremely important as it sets the foundation for most, if not all, of our efforts. From the previous exercises and insights we’ve gathered, we would choose what we believe to be the best fit for our marketing budget, compared to our target audience / personas, and would develop our actual marketing strategies from there.
For example, if we were to choose social media, blogging and SEO for our strategies, some examples of next steps would be:
Of course, this is the type of service that we excel at and work with our clients on, so we can’t give away all our secrets But, this should provide you with a better understanding of how we approach digital marketing and media, and work with our clients on it to develop and execute strategies to help grow their business online.
Have you worked on this before with anyone? Do you provide this service to others? What are your thoughts regarding our process? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’re interested in exploring your online marking opportunities further - then Get In Touch! with us to find out more about how we can help you!
Cheers!
